We signed and notarized the vast majority of the new dossier yesterday. We only await the updated homestudy and that of course is awaiting the redo of my fingerprints, however the first part of those got to our homestudy agency last Tuesday so I'm hopeful that they will get the final check early this week. Once we have that our dossier is ready for the trip to Sacramento and then we'll be able to ship it out.

There were a lot of comment about how expensive the apostille process is here in California and unfortunately our state is a very microcosm of the nation in general. And as a result I don't believe anything can be done to alter the fee schedule or have something like Texas has in which the costs are capped at a certain number. The state government is not rolling in surpluses and thus cannot afford to give up even the slightest amount of revenue (no matter how logical the cause).

Back to the timeline for us getting to Novosibirsk, I really want to see that homestudy update done asap and if we can get it before the week's end we should be in good shape.

"The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it."